Urbin Report

Wednesday, November 05, 2003

If you have any doubts, read the recently published book of his letters. They reveal a man whose compassion for other people is deep and earnest, and whose spiritual life is based on faith in a loving God, not a vengeful one.

...producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron won’t tell you. They have exhibited astounding carelessness and cruelty in their depiction of my father and my entire family. They never consulted any family member, nor did they speak to anyone who has known us throughout the years. In the New York Times on October 21st, one of the writers admitted that the line about AIDS victims was completely fabricated. In that same article, Jim Rutenberg reported that the producers claimed no major event was depicted without two confirming sources.

Reading the script actually made me feel better in some ways. It is, quite simply, idiotic. Everyone is a caricature, manufactured and inauthentic.

But the idiocy of the script can’t dilute the cruelty behind it. To deliberately and calculatingly depict public people as shallow, intolerant, cold and inept, with no truths or facts to back up the portrayals, is nothing short of malevolent.

Consider the scene in a girls’ boarding school I supposedly was attending when my father was elected governor of California (I was never at an all-girls’ boarding school.) They have a classmate saying to me, ?Hitler’s just been elected governor.? No one writes a line like that with any other agenda except to wound.